Oscillators working in the frequency range from a few hundred Megahertz up to several Gigahertz are required in many integrated circuits of telecommunications technology. With modem bipolar silicon or MOS semiconductor technologies, such circuits can be integrated on a chip as ring oscillators without external elements (WO 95/06356). The oscillation frequency, however, is greatly dependent on the operating temperature of the chip and on scatter of the semiconductor parameters. The employment of oscillators having less basic precision in, for example, clock recovery circuits therefore requires complicated auxiliary circuits such as reference phase-locked loops (IEEE J. Of Solid-State Circuits, 28 (1993) 12, 1310 . . . 1313) or external components such as quartz crystals (IEEE 1991 Bipolar Circuits and Technology Meeting, 12.4, 293 . . . 296) that make the overall circuit more complex and the structure more expensive. Furthermore, a large tuning range of the oscillator is needed in order to be able to level the initial center frequency error, this leading to increased phase noise (jitter), and also makes it difficult to realize such a circuit at extremely high frequencies (above 5 GHz).
No basic precision that suffices for a clock recovery circuit without a reference phase-locked loop or external balancing can be anticipated even given employment of bond wires as frequency-defining elements of an oscillator (ELECTRONICS LETTERS, 30(1994) 3, 244 . . . 245), due to the manufacturing tolerances in bonding.